SMARTPHONES: ZTE Sees Double with New Smartphone

Bottom line: ZTE's new dual-screen smartphone
will turn some heads and raise the company's profile briefly due to
the novelty factor, but the effect will quickly fade due to lack of
practical uses.

ZTE tries two screens

You can't blame 'em for trying. That's the first thing that came to
mind when I saw the announcement and some photos of a new
foldable ZTE (HKEx: 763; Shenzhen: 000063)
smartphone with two screens. This clearly looks like the company's
attempt to find new relevance in the cutthroat smartphone market,
where phones increasingly look and feel the same. The move seems to
be part of a recent trend that says "give them more space" on their
screen, which others are trying to do by creating phones whose
entire face is taken up by the screen.

I'm not really a gadget person, but from a business perspective I
do have to credit ZTE for trying to find something new to
distinguish itself from the pack. The company was one of China's
earliest success stories in the cellphone and later the smartphone
space. But a big portion of its products still go to US wireless
carriers who stamp their own brand on the phones and give little or
no space to their Chinese supplier.

All that said, let's take a closer look at this new model, called
the Axon M, and whether it has the potential to breathe some new
life into ZTE's sputtering smartphone business, which is barely a
top 10 global players. The model's most outstanding feature is, of
course, its twin screens, which can fold up into a single-sized
phone, albeit a bulky one. (company announcement)

The idea behind the two screens is that you can run a single app on
them and get twice as large an image as a single screen. That might
be good for gamers or people who like to do a lot of reading on
their phones. But I've heard the same thing said of tablets, and it
seems that people ultimately prefer to do their reading and gaming
on specialty devices or just their regular smartphones rather than
these specialty larger models. You can also run two separate apps
at the same time, one per screen, though I honestly can't think of
too many instances where I've wanted to do something like that.

Carried by Carriers

As with many of its other models, the phone will initially be
available through ZTE's carrier partners, in this case
through AT&T in the U.S. and later through
other carriers globally. There are no prices, but the monthly
package figure for the AT&T model implies a price of about
$700, which certainly isn't cheap but also isn't too outrageous
considering costs are higher due to the two screens.

The reviews for the phone are pretty mixed, though it's worth
noting that they appear to be based on some really quick
impressions since reviewers weren't given that much time with the
models. Most of them note how clunky the design is, since these new
phones are twice as thick as existing single screen models. There's
obviously a certain amount of fascination with the double-screen
design, but that novelty factor could quickly fade.

I had my own similar experience with
a Lenovo (HKEx: 992) Yoga computer, which is
similar in that it can be a laptop and also fold all the way back
on itself to become a bulky tablet computer with a touch screen.
Needless to say, the novelty factor quickly wore off and I rarely
used the tablet PC functions after a few months. If I had to choose
again, I would ditch this particular design, which never really
caught on.

One of my contacts who follows these things more closely concurred
that the dual screens, while not a first, should at least turn some
heads in the beginning. ZTE also has strong partners in the US
especially, where it's actually a top 5 player due to its carrier
relationships. But at the end of the day, I doubt this new design
will have legs, mostly because of its bulky design and the fact
that people will quickly tire of its awkward fold-out design and
see no reason for running two apps at a time. Accordingly, it's
unlikely to do much to revive ZTE's smartphone business.